The diaphragm is a large, thin sheet of muscle dividing the thoracic (chest) cavity from the abdominal cavity (belly), and is the major muscle of breathing. As the diaphragm contracts, the lungs move downwards, expand and fill with air. Diaphragmatic breathing, along with breathing through the nose (not the mouth) is essential for healthy breathing. However, as a breathing educator I see many clients –especially those with ME/CFS/fibromyalgia or anxiety who make little or no use of this important muscle! Instead, they often breathe though the mouth, the breathing is obvious in the upper chest, accessory muscles in the upper chest and neck and shoulders do the donkey work of lifting the ribcage, and posture is often slumped.Continue Reading

A client asked me recently “Why not write a topic about what deep breathing actually means in the Buteyko context?” So here goes, I am preparing to open a can of worms… But before I do that I will just recap that as a breathing educator I identify and help to correct (using the Buteyko method), disordered or dysfunctional breathing and that:The aim of breathing education is to restore a healthy breathing pattern, to allow the natural, normal, nasal, soft, gentle, smooth, quiet, invisible, efficient, underlying breathing pattern to emerge, so breathing is easier and with the diaphragm free. The most effective way of doing this is by relaxation; by removal of layers of tension caused by bad breathing habits and stress. As the breathing softens and reduces, symptoms decrease too. Dr Buteyko called his method “reduced breathing by relaxation”.And when I teach I avoid the word DEEP like the plague! That is because it is so utterly confusing as it means two (at least) completely different things to different people:Continue Reading

About me/ contact

You can sign up to Breathing Remedies newsletter here. Information on posture and breathing and how they affect health.

Or phone me 01663 743055 (Dr Janet Winter)

Hello, I am Janet, a Breathing educator, (Buteyko Breathing Method) and I help people recover from asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety, sleep problems, headaches, IBS chronic fatigue (ME/CFS) and more, by improving their dysfunctional breathing. Both myself and my teenage son have recovered from ME/CFS, and I want to help more people with these devastating illnesses.

I trained to be a Breathing Educator with Jennifer Stark and Savio D’Souza. Jennifer has been teaching Buteyko for almost 20 years and conducted several of the successful asthma clinical trials of the Buteyko method in the West. (The Buteyko Method relieves asthma symptoms, and has been listed in the UK Asthma Guideline since 2008).
I am a member of the Buteyko Breathing Educators Association and am fully insured.

I am also a qualified postural alignment specialist (PAS) trained by Nicole Lourens of the Egoscue University. Good posture is essential for good breathing and proper function in general.

I had been involved in healthcare/biomedical research for 30 years although previously in a very different role: before training as a Breathing educator, I spent 20 years in drug discovery looking for new painkillers for a major pharmaceutical company based in a London Institute.
I worked as a neuroscientist and cell biologist, directing a team of bench scientists. (So I am not a medical doctor but I have a PhD in Neuroscience) I authored or co-authored more than 50 journal articles and reviews on my research. I have also worked as a medical writer, so have a firm grounding in evidence-based medicine. My professional profile can be seen here on LINKEDIN.

Why I became a breathing educator

If you are reading this because you have CFS/ME, I know what you are going through. I know what it is like to hold onto a job by my fingernails, worried about how we would feed the family if I lost my job, come home and eat and sleep and spend my weekend recovering.
I had no social life. I was lucky to quickly get to a consultant who diagnosed me with candidiasis, and anti-fungals and a yeast and sugar-free diet helped a lot, but not enough.
I felt I had been “written off” and had nothing to offer. I was a mum, partner and employee with massively reduced physical and mental output compared with previously. I suspected my symptoms were “stress related” but they did not ease when I left my stressful job and moved out of London to the countryside.
For me (after trying many different avenues, cranial osteopathy, chiropractic, mercury amalgam filling removal and more – I became a “fat-folder patient”), breathing education worked, it was a big missing piece of my health puzzle, and one I had frankly never considered.

Changing my breathing back to a more normal pattern really helped me. One definition of stress is “anything that makes you breathe more”. And I know now that breathing too much can actually deplete the body of oxygen. And stress can be emotional or physical. Looking back on my history I can clearly see my own physical and emotional stresses accumulating, from a very traumatic bereavement, on-going work and family stresses, then a really bad summer respiratory infection and cough that was not shifted by two different antibiotics (but they probably contributed to unbalancing my gut flora, hence the fungal overgrowth/candidiasis).

A cough seems to be one of the best ways to mess up your breathing pattern, and many of my clients tell me “I was fine until I had that cough/chest infection, and I never really got my health back!!” The breathing centre in the brain gets to think that big volume breathing is normal and unless you know about it, it is sometimes hard to recover. Luckily you CAN retrain your breathing by doing a series of gentle exercises and making some life style changes, and you CAN have hope of better health.
So that is why I do what I do and why I am passionate about it; I found a way to improve my chronic fatigue by better breathing and I trained as a breathing educator so I could help others with this devastating disease. There is so little help out there for them (you?).

Then chronic backache made good breathing impossible, and I discovered postural alignment therapy (Egoscue) to help with that. And I am still amazed at the progress I am making -it’s wonderful to have decreased pain and increased function when I had accepted decline at my age was inevitable. It’s not!